The build was tested on 06 Septmeber 2010 with 32-bit Ubuntu 10.10 beta image, AMI ami-be6288d7. At the time of testing the 10.04 (LTS) image was not working due to the bug in shipped gzip. The status of the cloud config in the older versions of the ubuntu and debian is not clear. The list of the released images for ubuntu could be found here.

The procedure completely configures the image, so there is no need to use customized images or EBS-based images. The S3-based image provides more than enough "ephemerial" storage to perform the build.

After around 15 minutes required to initialize, start and install software one could point the browser to primitive page on the public DNS address of the instance to browse the build directory or get log of the bitbake.

The resulting machine deploy image could be downloaded directly from the browser, so no additional software is required.

The test was run on the c1.medium instance, which is correspondingly accessible and powerful enough. Spot instance was used to further reduce price of the build. The build was using parallel make with 2 threads and parallel bitbake with 2 threads as well.

The complete cycle from starting the instance to finished build took 2 hours 20 minutes.

The m1.small type of virtual machine proved to be underpowered (the build was cancelled after 5 hours).

The procedure retrieves quite a lot of data (sources) from the internet, but at the time of testing an incoming traffic was free and outgound traffic was negligibly small. After November 1, the inbound traffic will be priced as well, which will introduce additional costs. Caching of the downloaded files on an EBS volume could be considered in the future.